With image representations evolving rapidly into a viable consumer electronic business, digital photography and digital images are emerging to fill the needs of image representation. Images are commonly captured by digital cameras or digital scanners. A typical digital camera captures a picture and stores the captured pictorial information in a digital data format. Also, a conventional digital scanner scans pictures, such as, a color photographic film (e.g., 35 mm), and converts the scanned pictorial information into digital image data.
Once an image is captured and the captured image data is generated, it is often difficult to display the captured image. One conventional approach is to use a personal computer (“PC”) to display the images. In this approach, the image data is first transferred to the PC from an image capturing device, such as, a digital camera, and then the PC displays the image according to the image data received. A problem with this approach is that a regular PC may not be able to process the image data without additional software or hardware to reconfigure the PC. Moreover, a PC is usually not portable. Even though a laptop PC is portable, the laptop PC is inadequate for use as a picture frame because not only does the laptop PC have to be reconfigured so that it is capable of processing the image data, but it is also too expensive to use a laptop PC as a picture frame.
Another commonly employed approach is to use an image-processing machine, such as, a workstation, a mini-computer, or a mainframe. Like the PC, the image data must first be transferred to the image-processing machine, and the image-processing machine, subsequently, displays the image after processing the image data. This approach posts similar problems as a PC that the image-processing machine has to be reconfigured before it is able to process the image data. Also, the image-processing machine is not typically mobile.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have an inexpensive digital media frame that is capable of obtaining images with or without a PC and capable of displaying images in places where a PC cannot go. As will be seen, one embodiment of the present invention provides a portable digital media frame that displays images.